mercredi 3 octobre 2012

How Google's Search Engine Changes Effect Your SEO Strategy

By Drew Jeffreys


The search landscape has shifted significantly over the past year. Google released Panda, and then more recently, the Penguin update and these changes have had a major impact on business marketing. With each update Google is trying to reduce spam and bring the most relevant pages to your search terms. Is the algorithm always doing the best job? Of course not. With each update there seems to be a large group of disgruntled webmasters who used to rank well for certain phrases that are longer in contention for the top spots.

These changes are forcing business owners and SEO companies to re-think their marketing campaigns. These SEO teams have had to go back to the drawing board in some instances where well-ranking websites have all but dropped off the radar. In the past, webmasters focused on keyword density and the volume of back-links to their pages. With this update keyword stuffing and back-links were both affected. Some data suggests domains which had a similar keyword as anchor from various sources were adversely affected. This would suggest that using varied anchor text from reliable sources in the way to go.

These changes also centered on quality content. Unique and meaningful content is becoming more and more important to Google's approach. Cheap article creation aimed solely at back-links is not going to work going forward. Business owners and SEO specialists alike need to focus on well-written articles that create back-links the natural way. "Creating great content is going to be the best way to garner attention from both the Google search algorithm and readers who want to consume what you've created and pass it along to others," says Howie Dumont with a NJ Social Media Marketing.

Social media continues its rise in the Internet marketing landscape as well. Around the same time of the release of Penguin, Google announced a new Google Analytics offering directed at social media monitoring. You are now able to track your traffic back to see how the visitor arrived and see a wealth of information about your campaigns. It suggests that using social media is becoming paramount for search marketing campaigns. They can be leveraged to promote quality content that gets natural attention.

It's been a really busy year for both Google and SEO folks alike. It will likely be some time yet before the dust really settles on the effects of these changes. Of course I doubt Google will let the dust settle. They've communicated that more changes of this nature are on the way. Again, we must hope that these changes will benefit everyone and really reduce spam and junk search results from folks who are obviously not serving up quality content. Let's just hope that they are careful to reduce the risk of downgrading quality sites who have domain authority.




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